


A Sunrise

by Prozaco



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Ambiguous Relationships, Character Study, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, M/M, Top!Zagreus, Translation, bottom!Thanatos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27258898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prozaco/pseuds/Prozaco
Summary: He'd seen the sun, and now he could compare Thanatos' eyes to the brightness of it.
Relationships: Thanatos & Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 87





	A Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [一次日出](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/707245) by Indigo. 



> Original author's notes:  
> * Inspired by Alecto's calling Zag "redblood" and Zag's reaction to seeing the sun for the first time.  
> *A sequel to[《爱神诞生之地》](https://indigo1201.lofter.com/post/1b5b10_1ca945d65)
> 
> Link to original Weibo post: [《一次日出》](https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404561479415234873)

Zagreus has felt special since he was a child.

Special, which sounds like an inevitable delusion that every teenager has at puberty, makes it difficult even to raise the question. It was an extremely vague feeling, like looking through a vapor-filled glass into the distance, but always sticking out behind him.

Perhaps you've been through a certain experience like this. You come home one day, and at some point, you find that everything you know around you suddenly feels alien. The marble tiles in the hallway, for example, have always been so spacious and clean? Or the unobtrusive fingerprints on the bedroom wall, have they always been there? Of course, you know the answer is "always." You live here. But somehow, in a flash, you are just captured by a sense of dislocation that comes from nowhere.

And such moments come with no warning. It could be when you stand up to clean up after dinner, or when you look up from your work, or when you walk in the house at the end of the day, take off your shoes, bend over to drop your shopping bag, and straighten up again. In any case, with no warning, just as you lift your head back up, that moment happens.

Everything looks the same, but it feels like something has changed. You can't tell what exactly it is, as if someone stole the original owner of this body away, then forced you into it the very next second. You're filled with a strong conviction like never before that you truly realize the life you're living doesn't suit you. But where is your real life? You don't know.

You are overwhelmed, standing there like a stranger who has knocked on the wrong door or a thief who is afraid of being caught by the real owner. Soon, just for ten or more seconds, the strange feeling subsides, and the furniture becomes familiar and lovely again. The intense desire for a real-life that had been stirring in your heart for less than half a minute also receded. So you shrink back into this shell, and you can stay in peace again for a while. But the thief, the one who stole your life, never left, still snooping in the shadows, waiting for a moment to strike you from behind and have you captured by your true longing again.

In short, the young prince, Zagreus, had faced this situation since the day he was born.

No one in the Underworld seems to think of anything wrong with this situation.

When Zagreus confided in Nyx about this distress, the Goddess of the Night responded softly. "My dear child, you are the one prince of the Underworld. Of course, you are special." If Nyx wasn't hiding something deliberately, this answer was nothing short of frustrating. There is no doubt that every god in the Underworld is special. You'd never meet another Nyx, just like there is no other Thanatos in the world. Even Hypnos, the twin brother of Death, looked nothing like him.

The question that kept Zagreus restless was whether or not he really belonged here. Yet the question was too absurd and ridiculous even for someone who had always been a loose cannon like him. No matter which floor of _Hades_ one was on, one would only get the same answer: if it wasn't, where else could it be? Even those dark spirits who had once been nostalgic for human life would willingly acknowledge in death that they belonged to the jurisdiction of the underworld, let alone Hades' son. Even his stern, no-nonsense father believed that Zag was born to carry on his work.

Then, for the first time, the lingering premonition was confirmed in an accident.

The House of Hades was solemn, empty, desolate, and quiet. Even the tall stature of his father seemed tiny in it. Beyond the windows, in the deep purple darkness, new souls marched silently down the long corridors. In the palace without laughter, time is stretched into infinity, and only silence endures. Being an heir of the gods of the Underworld is never easy, and to grow up here, you have to rack your brains for something to do to survive the dullness. Thankfully, in terms of causing trouble, Zagreus can make the top of the list of the underworld. Thus, there was a time when, to pass the long, boring days, in addition to learning combat skills with various weapons from his teacher Achilles, the young prince of the underworld became obsessed with hide-and-seek.

His playground was vast, from Tartarus to Elysium, all playable territory except for the rat-infested rooms of Temple of Styx. What soul wouldn't like to do the prince a small favor, as long as he wasn't trying to escape. He also had a great playmate - Thanatos, his half-brother. Most of the time, Zag hid, and Thanatos sought. Zagreus, with a nimble mind at odds with the serious atmosphere of the House, could always find a new hideout with an inventive twist. The wardrobe of Nyx, the boats and vaults of Charon, behind the shield of the Greatshields, beneath the warm fur of Cerberus, and even the rushing Styx had all been chosen by him as excellent hiding places. And Thanatos, the god of death with golden wings, had mastered the balance of the game so skillfully that no matter how brilliantly Zag's hideout was chosen, he could always find him at the last minute of the game.

That's the fun of hide-and-seek: the fear that you'll be found soon and the worry that you'll never be found. It was an unspoken rapport. Zag even wondered if it was the hide-and-seek itself that he loved, or the holding of his breath, the beating of his heart as he waited to be discovered by Thanatos. They never tired of it, and when they were boys, they hid in almost every place they could in the underworld, repeating the game of being briefly apart and always reunited.

Until one day, Hades decided to add a new facility to the underworld but forgot to tell his son.

Half of his shoulder was already drenched in blood by the time Thanatos spotted Zagreus. With his right hand still gripping the sword, blood was pouring out of the hole where the left shoulder had been shot through, snaking its way down the firm lines of the young man's muscles and gathering into a small pool of blood at his flaming feet.

"Why didn't you call out to me? Didn't we agree to call each other by name in case of danger? You know I'll be right there for you." Thanatos had rushed up and grabbed Zagreus' hand before he could react. Wondering what spell he had cast, Zagreus felt his body suddenly lighten. A brief dizziness hit him, and he was back in the prince's chamber as he opened his eyes again. Zag quickly realized that the teleportation was a spell from Thanatos, perhaps the same spell he used when he went to the battlefield to harvest souls and lead them the way.

"Did you get a hole through your brain too? Heal your wounds now!"

Thanatos apparently recognized his distraction, and his tone was tinged with a touch of thin rage beyond anxiety. His golden eyes, which looked like molten gold when he was angry, glinted like they would scald someone.

"No, I just ..." The young prince had no intention of defending himself but was driven by some mixed emotion to caress Thanatos' cheek - with his bloodied hand. Death's dark skin was immediately stained with the smell of rust as if he had just returned from a living hell. The color of his lips got so vivid, almost kissable.

"Than, look, it's red."

Zagreus lowered his voice to a whisper, but never from fear, nor the weakness brought on by blood loss. In fact, they both knew that Thanatos's anger was merely concern, and none of them would die in a world where Hades ruled absolutely. The true source of Zagreus's confusion was staining Thanatos's cheeks and his lips.

"My blood is red." As if to establish the fact, Zagreus repeated softly.

His blood was as warm as his voice.

Red, the color of the temple curtain, the warm fur of Cerberus, the cloak of his father, Varatha the Eternal Spear, the rushing stream of Styx. And yet, it should not be the blood that flows from a wound of someone in the Underworld.

The spirits did not bleed. The Bloodless did not bleed. They may burn, crumble, but there was not a drop of blood left. There was no more red-hot blood to shed, even for those who had been the noblest warriors before their deaths.

Zag had seen Thanatos's blood when he was too young to grasp the limits of a fight (oddly enough, Thanatos had always been restrained and had never hurt him). The tiny cuts his teeth had caused on Thanatos's arms were gone quickly, but he still remembered that Thanatos bled a deep purple. The icy liquid, as purple as the pierced butterfly he wore, was as deep as the eternal darkness of the night that hung outside his window. Zag did not doubt that if he punctured the skin of Nyx and Hypnos, it would be the same blood that flowed out.

The burning blood that poured out of Zagreus's wounds had always been there. They were always surging through the river of the underworld, pooling in the pool of Styx. It was the blood that came from the surface earth and traveled thousands of miles into the Underworld.

"I'm sorry, Than," Zagreus withdrew his hand from the face of Death, apologizing either for dirtying his beautiful face or for the conclusion he was about to draw, "I suppose...I don't belong here."

As the words fell out, the premonition that had been shadowing him all along was verified for the first time.

Never before had he felt such a sharp sense of intensity with such clarity as if he were finding clues in a puzzle box. The prince felt like someone who kept wiping the fogged glass, trying to peer through the brief moments of clarity.

"If you know anything about me, be sure to tell me." He stepped even closer and whispered the request. He knew how hard it would be for Thanatos to refuse him. If it wasn't, he wouldn't have spared the time from his tiring job to spend his boredom with him.

Death fell silent, furrowing his eyebrows, eyes flaming like burning metal. He always looked so serious when he wasn't smiling that Zagreus almost thought he was going to get mad again. But eventually, he just opened his mouth and replied gruffly, "I don't know, perhaps you should ask Mother. I have work to do, and I have to go now."

Saying that, he smiled as if trying to lighten the mood, but it was incredibly stiff, like he was forcing himself to bring up the corners of his mouth. He gazed at Zagreus and said word after word, "I know, you've always been special."

It might have been just a failed consolation, a kind phrase to ease the awkwardness, but Zagreus somehow caught a goodbye from it. However, without waiting for him to ask, Thanatos fluttered his wings and left in an instant, exactly the way he did when he found the prince.

It took many years before Zagreus learned that, at that time, the blunt reaction of Death was not in restraining anger, but rather that a man didn't know how to retain when he witnessed the inevitable fulfillment of a prophecy of fate.

After that, they stopped contacting each other for a long time.

See? This is how hide-and-seek works: you need the other person to be willing to seek you, and you to be willing to be found by him.

Then, another piece of the puzzle emerged. It turned out that Nyx was not Zagreus's real mother, and the one who gave birth to him had long since left the underworld. The day he discovered the secret, the prince had a big fight with his father and then sat in his messy chamber, staring. That familiar sense of dislocation struck him from behind again, and everything became alien to him.

But this time, all the strangeness finally came to an end - he used to think that something wasn't in the right place, which made his life so misfitting. It wasn't until then that he realized, he was the one who had been misplaced.

He was determined to leave without saying goodbye to Thanatos - or maybe they had already done so. In the evening of his youth, in his chamber, Death had held his hands and said to him, "I know you've always been special."

Zag had always known that his brother and friend hadn't been forthright enough with his feelings, yet what was he trying to say then? He boasted that he knew how to read people, but now he was unwilling to guess. The remnants of those words sank into the darkness like the iceberg underwater. Only the touch of Thanatos' skin remained at his fingertips.

In the shallow sleep of Zagreus, he dreamed of that scene at times. Thanatos's eyes like burning gold, his lips stained with Zag's warm blood. He could taste the blood once he covered them. Then he would wake from the dream to see the deep purple of eternal night beyond the window. There was no day or night in the Underworld, and the impulses of his youth felt like it was yesterday. And he had already grown and matured, the vague feelings of his past clear as ever, and he put them away, pocketing them carefully.

* * *

After being swallowed up by the River Styx in the surface world, Zagreus fell into a deep sleep. He slept for a long time as if it had been the ten thousand and one time he had dragged his weary body to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, or as if he had been sleeplessly waiting for this moment since his birth.

His journey was long, fraught with danger, and he had to travel a long way to make it.

On his path, there were walking corpses, lava, the water of Lethe, and the bravest of warriors.

And, of course, there was Thanatos.

Zag met Thanatos again. He was stuck in a tough battle on the verdant green plains of Elysium when he was found by Death. It had been a long time since they last saw each other, and some things had changed on both of them, but Death had found him just as accurately as he did each time before.

So far, Zagreus had learned that the words "If you call me, I will hear you" were only an empty excuse from Thanatos. If you are not looking at me, how can you know that I am calling you? Those carefree games tinged with a different flavor as he realized it. He looked back into Thanatos's eyes - a belated look back - with a heart full of regret, imagining that someone had once gazed at him with the same silence for the past thousand days and nights.

"What on earth is good up there?" Thanatos couldn't help but ask him. For the god of death, who could travel between the Surface and the Underworld at will, the Surface was nothing but a barbaric slaughterhouse, not the least bit appealing. Thanatos was born and raised in the darkness. Everything in the Underworld fit against his skin like breathing, making it impossible for him to understand the isolation that Zagreus felt.

"I don't know," Zagreus admitted. After all, he had never set foot on the Surface before. At first, he just wanted to find his birth mother and ask why she had left him behind back then. But as he tried again and again, he came to realize that the journey was more than just a search for his mother. Up there meant more than just "the Surface." It was a longing for a life that truly belonged to him: everything is in the right place, everything fits. The annoying sense of dislocation will no longer attack his life out of the blue. -Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't.

But anyway, "I know I should take a look."

Thanatos didn't reply, and Zag knew he was putting more words into his heart when he did so. No one knew better than Zag that Thanatos wanted him to stay, just as no one knew better than Than that Zag would leave someday. What connects the two is a feeling that goes deeper than friendship. However, you always have to choose between what you want to do and what you need to do.

Having made it to Elysium, Zagreus believed he was strong enough, but on occasions like this, when he looked into Thanatos' eyes, after such a long time, he finally felt the softness that still lay beneath his ribs again.

Thanatos saw his hesitation, "Since you don't want to say it, I'll say it. Good-bye, Zagreus."

He spoke slowly and low like he was completing that unfinished farewell.

Zagreus moved on, hearing Death's deep voice from behind. Then he knew that even if he didn't understand, even if there was a long gap of disconnection, Thanatos was still, once again, standing beside him.

But his journey was long, fraught with danger, and he had to travel a long way to make it.

He can not turn back.

* * *

Later, the heroic tale of the prince of the Underworld was widely told by Orpheus, who wrote it into his songs.

But it is not that one we are going to talk about.

Zagreus awoke from his long slumber, feeling clearer in consciousness than ever before.

The sentences stuck in his throat like a soft mass of watercress. He wanted to ask Thanatos if, like Nyx, he had known about his relationship with Persephone and had simply chosen to conceal it.

He wanted to tell him that he saw the world upon the surface. Vast, cruel, but beautiful. Pushing through the gates of _Hades_ , he was greeted by an endless expanse of snow. It was so cold, so different from the blazing heat down there, that it was hard to believe that humans were living in such temperatures. The snow hanging on the branches was light and soft, adorned the lake with white and glitter. These creations of Demeter looked as gentle and inaccessible as herself, and they melted with his flames as he stepped through, revealing the true nature of the muddy earth. It slowed his pace, spots of mud splattering against his shins, and with each step, the melting truth seemed to give birth to a fable.

He also wanted to tell him that, at sunrise, the ocean tide ran red. The golden-red sun was warm and blinding, brighter than any candle in the Underworld. He thought that Thanatos would never have noticed any of this. He was always in such a hurry. Nor would he have noticed that Greece was not so far from them. Through the snowy paths, he reached his mother's garden. He wanted to show Thanatos how beautiful the gardens on the Surface were, with his mother, whom he had never met, standing in the center, glowing with the light that illuminates the world.

He wanted to tell Thanatos about all the roads he'd traveled. The life that fit against his skin like breathing turned out not to exist. What he'd been searching for all along was here, never anywhere else.

He almost did. However, he didn't. Perhaps because Death's grip on his hand was too warm or because he looked tender like never before. When Zag noticed that he was being watched intently by Thanatos, all the language he had learned vanished. He bowed and retreated before the word _love_ , like a siren who had sacrificed her vocal cords.

Luckily, he'd seen the sun, and now he could compare Thanatos' eyes to the brightness of it.

Zagreus grabbed Thanatos' hand and rose to kiss him on the lips. The lips of Death were soft as in his dreams.

He gazed into those golden eyes.

I saw a sunrise, he said.


End file.
